Not your father's Winter Park: armed with a mega-resort blueprint, new management aims to profit.

• Author: Best, Allen
• Position: Intrawest Corp.

By Presidents Weekend last winter, less than two months after Intrawest Corp. had assumed management of Winter Park Resort, the ski area's future was clear to Craig Pollit. Intrawest was clearly and urgently focused on profits.

The focus was most evident in orders from Winter Park's new managers--delivered during the resort's busiest time of year--to managers of all restaurants, rental shops, and other businesses to analyze their strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"Although certainly a very standard business practice, it was new for us at that level, and also good," says Pollit, the resort's vice president of finance for eight years. "It certainly opened my eyes." While Intrawest opened Pollit's eyes, it also showed him the door.

In October, the company that describes itself as "the leading developer and operator of mountain resorts across North America" let Pollit go. The change from a nonprofit to a for-profit business, he says without rancor, "shook itself out and I got shaken out."

Profits were rarely a driving concern at Winter Park, Colorado's oldest continuously operated ski area. Winter Park was opened in 1939 as the crown jewel of Denver's mountain parks. After World War II, the resort, operated by the quasi-private, city-appointed, nonprofit Winter Park Recreational Association, whose board members were usually a collection of Colorado ski boosters, quietly and then boisterously recorded annual double-digit growth as baby boomers came of age.

Denver, however, never expected anything back from its crown jewel, although a generation of Denver baby boomers riding weekend trains learned to ski there.

Instead of generating profits, the ski area pioneered the nation's best-known handicap ski program, attracting thousands of amputees, including scores of Vietnam War veterans. By 1978, Winter Park was less of a weekend ski area for Denver than a stay-and-play destination for the nation.

And Denver began wondering what it was gaining from its ownership. The result was a 1994 agreement between Denver and the Recreational Association in which Winter Park agreed to pay $2 million annually, except under unusual circumstances. Winter Park eventually paid $13 million, but by the late 1990s the unusual was starting to become commonplace.

Simply put, Winter Park was losing market share. The only solution, said the Recreational Association, was significant investment in refurbishing the product. Because it...